At what point, in this
great nation of immigrants, did calling someone an “immigrant” become such an
insult?

Better question – at what point did any
serious journalist or opinion writer decide that there as a latent or
widespread hatred of immigrants, and that the term has become an insult? The
true insult is using the term “immigrant” for those who brazenly break the law
to enter the country.

Recent
weeks — on the campaign trail and elsewhere — have been filled with ugly
rhetoric about immigration status or other ethnic impurities, even when the
target of such attacks has entered the country legally, is a naturalized
American or is even an American by birth but descended from the wrong kind of
parents. Witness Donald Trump’s proposal to deport first-generation Americans
whose citizenship is conferred upon them, constitutionally, by birth. Witness legions of white nationalistslining
up behind him, and the coded “dog-whistle politics” that other candidates are
invoking to attract their own anti-immigrant coalitions.

David Duke likes Donald Trump. That is a bad
sign. The notion that white people all over the country are sporting white
hoods, burning crosses, and attacking black folks is a reprehensible fraud.

Even
presidential contenders who are themselves the children of immigrants and lucky
legatees of the great American melting pot are denouncing the uncontrollable
invasion of foreigners.

And who would those individuals be? The
columnist provides nothing substantive. She might want to discuss how the
Republican Party Presidential candidates sport one of htemost diverse and
impressive benches in recent memory, compared to the Dead White European Male
(and one Female) bench which has become the Democratic Party. For a political
cause which had worked so hard to reach out and torture minority perceptions to
despite liberty and limited government, they have done little else to expand
the influence and respect of minority leaders.

It’s
tempting to blame Trump for igniting the fires of xenophobia, betraying the
great tradition of embracing immigrant strivers. But the embarrassing truth is
that the United States has always been hostile to immigrants. Or at least, a
strong and vocal faction has been. This nativist streak dates back even to the
earliest days of the republic.

This is the biggest lie I have read yet in any
major newspaper.

You
know Ellis Island, the place textbooks portray as the welcoming ward for
generations of dreamers?

“We
think of Ellis Island as this great monument to immigration. It’s really the
monument to border control,” says Morris Vogel, president of the Lower East Side
Tenement Museum, which painstakingly reconstructs the squalor and
ambition of 19th- and 20th-century immigrants. Ellis Island was, Vogel notes,
“the first wall,” often used to repel undesirables.

“Undesirables” include individuals with
severe, communicable disease, as well as domestic terrorists and anarchists.
The present age forgets that one President was assassinated by a deranged
immigrant anarchist (McKinley), and his successor was nearly killed in a
similar manner (Teddy Roosevelt). Every nation takes necessary and proper steps
to ensure secure borders and safe citizens. That is neither hateful nor
spiteful.

[In]1882,
Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act,
the first major immigration law to restrict entry of a specific ethnic group,
after complaints that the Chinese were polluting American culture and
appropriating American jobs.

Congress implemented those laws. Not the
country.

What
about the European immigrants welcomed in decades prior, when they fled
poverty, persecution or potato famine?

Well,
in the mid-19th century, an entire national political party — the Know Nothings
— was predicated on fears that morally and racially inferior German and Irish
Catholic immigrants were threatening the livelihoods and liberties of
native-born Protestants.

The Know-Nothings had marginal influence, and
became a laughing stock which dissipated into nothing.

Even
earlier, some of our most venerated Founding Fathers — people who had abundant
evidence of the additive properties of ethnic diversity and benefits of
infusing the economy with fresh blood — exhibited frighteningly nativist
tendencies. Benjamin Franklin denounced the scourge of “swarthy” German
immigrants who refused to speak English, for example.

Ben Franklin. His actions speak for every
American? Really?!

Even
the West Indian-born Alexander Hamilton — arguably the immigrant who made the
biggest contribution to U.S. political history — later in his career denounced
lax immigration policies. In the terrific bio-musical
of his life now lighting up Broadway, the word “immigrant” is often
hurled at him as a winking epithet. But in real life, perhaps for reasons of
political expedience, he warned of
letting in and then naturalizing too many foreigners, whose inferior breeding
and insufficient commitment to American values might threaten the fragile
republic. “In the infancy of the country, with a boundless waste to people, it
was politic to give a facility to naturalization; but our situation is now changed,”
he wrote in 1802.

In stunning yet disappointing fashion, Rampell
references a musical (which no one has heard of), but refuses to cite statistical
data or researched evidence to support her unserious (and offensive) argument of
widespread and long-standing hatred of immigrants among Americans.

Americans, born and naturalized, are Neither
racist, xenophobic, nor anti-immigrant, but they are angry with rogue leaders
and the lack of enforcement in this country, and they are angry with their
leaders for not taking the necessary steps to respect their rights.